[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
There's a very schematic summary at <http://xorban.wordpress.com/grammar/> -- click the links at the top for a range of schematic summaries. I confess I would struggle to grock much from these if I was coming to the discussions cold. Orthography and phonology and morphology and lexical items' forms has been discussed, but nothing decided. Some aspects we are tending to agree will stay as they are; other aspects we are tending to agree will change; and other aspects we've not discussed enough to form a consensus on yet. What we've mostly got is the basic syntax (words have either always one or always two or always no complements, and complements follow the head), basic binding and predicate--argument structure, and a set of basic quantifiers and operators. This all takes us to a state where pretty much everything we can think of is reasonablystraightforwardly sayable. BTW, Jorge: tV (or should we use provisionally "dV" to echo _the_?) the definiteness operator appears to be missing from the list of unary operators.Plus possibly vV, kali9putra, On 05/09/2012 17:06:
Thanks to forgetting to update my address on several lists, I have come to this discussion well into the thick of it. I have been trying to reconstruct where things are at the moment but 1) reading the messages in sequence constantly takes me off on tangents, from which I never quite get back to the point I was pursuing, and 2) reading by topic plants me in the middle of developed themes with no indication where the givens (terminology, abbreviations, etc.) come from, making it hard to blend them into a whole. Could someone provide a succinct summary of where matters stands now on Xorban and anything else that is relatively stable? What I have at the moment is a confusing mass of notes, which I can sum up as something like the following (ignoring phonology and morphology, if I can) The core of a sentence is a predicate followed by variables, separated by markers.
Yes.
There is some discussion about how to treat arguments that are not needed for the present sentence (drop, insert dummies, use local variables) and how to add arguments, particularly agents, all without complicating the (I can't yet figure out) restrictions on the structure.
Yes. No consensus on this yet.
The core is preceded by other predicate+variable pieces that characterize the variables involved in the core. The variables are also quantified as universal, particular, or specific(?) and maybe others.
The quantifiers we have are universal, rV, existential (is that the same as particular?), sV, and then lV, which is xorlo _lo_.
Cores with more or less the same variables may be strung together to indicate that they are to be evaluated simultaneously (and at the same place?), as comprising single events.
There is an operator, "ju" that treats its complements as parts of the same event.
Some logical operations are apparently being dealt with by means of predicates rather than overtly logical operations: e.g.,the degree of overlaps of two sets of events rather than a quantifier on events, say.
All semantics-quantifiers (or all but one) could be treated as predicates, butcurrently three quantifiers have expressions as syntax-quantifiers.
Any of this vaguely right? How can the rest be corrected? What more is there to be said?>
See my summary above. Catching up with the discussion might be rather daunting, but the language design is pretty simple -- tho understanding how come such and such a sentence has such and such a meaning might not always be easy. --And.